Cat-lovers, Dog-lovers, and Computer Platforms

A topic of enduring fascination for me is trying to analyze why
people form polarized opinions and affinities about things. Why are
some people liberals and others conservative? Why do some people
like Chevies and others prefer Fords? Why do some like the toilet
paper to unroll from the top while others adamantly insist that it
should emerge from the bottom?

Then there are cat people, dog people, and a small minority who
are both. I am definitely in the first category, as is MacOpinion
columnist John Martellaro, who affirms in his latest Utopia
Planetia column on MacOpinion, "I'm a cat person. Totally,
thoroughly, and completely smitten by cats."

Like me, John admires cats largely "because they are so darned
independent." He notes, for instance, than no cat would stay put in
the back of a pickup truck stopped at a red light.

"Cats do their own thing," says John. "So when they decide to
hang around and love you, it's really cool." Actually, I had never
thought about it that way, although I suspect that if you stopped
feeding them, they would quickly find somewhere else to hang
around.

John says that the key to understanding cats is the Myers-Briggs
personality test for humans, specifically the Intuitive-Sensing
part. An "intuitive" person draws his values from within; tends to
live in his own world and tend to make up his own rules. Artists
and scientists are often strong Intuitive types, John notes.

On the other hand, "sensing" people depends on drawing values
from the outside world. They tend to look to others for rules of
life. Sales people and entertainers are often strong sensing types,
says John.

Intuitive types are temperamentally disinclined to follow the
crowd. "While his classmates in school are decisively engaged in
music, dating, makeup, and sports," says John, "the intuitive type
might take a strong interest in opera or fencing."

By contrast, "the sensing type can hardly stand to be singled
out and isolated from the group. The sensing personality will do
anything to fit in and be part of the group. The values of the
group become their own."

Ergo, John deduces, cats are intuitive types, and cat fanciers
tend to be as well, while dogs are sensing types, and the dog
enthusiasts, in John's experience, are inclined to enjoy having a
pet that behaves subserviently to them. I think this is a fair and
generally accurate analysis. My daughter, for instance, is in the
rarified group that likes both cats and dogs, and her personality
is also an interesting mix of intuitive and sensing traits.

"So what does this have to do with computers?" you may be
asking. Well, as John puts it, the Myers-Briggs analysis applies to
computer platforms as well. "It's possible to see how the tendency
to go along with the crowd could very well apply to PC users. while
the tendency to 'be different' could very well apply to Macintosh
users," he says.

This would go some distance toward explaining why many PC people
think Mac people are arrogant. "We aren't really," John says,
"we're just annoyingly independent. . . . Like cats."

Hmmmm. I have always been casually puzzled as to why there
always seemed to be more dog people than cat people, much the same
as I have been really puzzled as to why there are more PC
people than Mac people. The herd-following vs. independent analysis
has, of course, occurred to me before, but this cat-dog thing helps
highlight it.

Something John didn't address in his column is the aggravation
factor. Dog people seem to be relatively unbothered by all the
annoying things that dogs do like slobbering, barking, jumping up
on things and people, intimidating visitors and passers-by, chasing
cars, pooping on the lawn or sidewalk and never cleaning up after
themselves, the way they smell. Dogs are also high-maintenance
pets, demanding to be taken for walks and requiring frequent
baths.

These egregious aspects of dog-ownership are roughly analogous
to what PC-users live with on a day-to-day basis, things like
driver conflicts, configuration hassles, hard system crashes,
frequent system and application reinstalls, tech support calls,
worrying about viruses, etcetera and so on. Something as simple
(for Mac users, anyway) as adding a peripheral device might take
days and days.

As John notes, if his theory holds water, "then the Macintosh
versus PC religious war relates strongly to the polarity of one of
the most basic human personality traits . . . it may very well be
that our purchase decisions are really driven by our fundamental
human nature," although he hastens to note that the theory is not
complete because the ratio of sensing to intuitive types is not
nearly 09.1, so it doesn't entirely explain why PCs represent 90%
of personal computer sales. He proposes several non-animal related
reasons that may explain this.

However, he says he still can't help still can't help feeling
when watches a dog in the back of a pickup truck jumping around but
never, never jumping out, that "there may be something about human
nature that either leads us towards following the madding crowd . .
. or sailing off beyond the sunset. - that Mac users don't simply
choose to Think Different," but are different.
Fundamentally.

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We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.